Walk for Intergrid Commerce

Today I attended a protest in second life. It was called the walk for intergrid commerce. (for those of you who don’t know what Second Life is, it’s sorta like what you’d get if you mixed the matrix, photoshop, the Internet in the 90s ebay and Paypal all together and mutated it. It’s a virtual world run by a company in San Francisco called Linden Lab, where nearly all the content is created by the users, as opposed to, say WoW, where all the content is made by Blizzard.) At present, there are 2 “grids” or versions of the world: a Main Grid, where most of the interesting stuff happens, that is adults only. That’s not to say there are no teens there, masquerading as adults, but teens are not allowed there. The other grid is the Teen Grid, a much smaller area for only teenagers, where most people aren’t as motivated to build anything worth while, because they’ll be transferred to the main grid when they reach age 18. The grids are separated, with no communication, no transfer of items (except when a teenager is transferred to the main grid, when they get to keep their items), no exchange of anything. The walk for intergrid commerce was intended to get Linden Lab’s attention to try to get them to connect the grids. The main grid is already divided into mature and pg sections, so when people don’t want to go looking for porn, they don’t have to. The proposal basically suggests that teens gain access to the pg sims on the main grid, linking the grids. The teens will be able to access the pg sections and the teen grid section, but not the mature areas. The adults will only be able to access the area that composes the main grid already, without access to the teen grid area.

As it is, when teenages reach 18 years old they immediately lose contact with all their friends, and if they are taking any classes they automatically are unable to attend any more classes, as they graduate on their birthday, not the end of the semester. Teenagers are also unable to interact with their parents, or to attend any concerts or actually useful classes. With this proposal, Second Life will be more like the classic Internet, with everyone on a common ground able to interact as one (and I for one will be glad to finally be able to have a normal (relativily speaking) conversation, when/if the hookup takes place). We even got a few Linden to join us in the march, so hopefully this will work out great.

Here is a flickr set with photos I took of the event:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/72632382@N00/sets/72157600184716007/

And here is a set of photos by Lucky Figtree, who also attended:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/luckyfigtree/sets/72157600184244530/

and here is the origional proposal for the hookup by Alex Harbinger, the guy who set this all up.

http://www.alexharbinger.com/blog/proposal-unification/

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